[In the following essay, Walker assesses the works of nineteenth-century female poets as part of the realist tradition.]

Since the 1940s, poetry has been virtually excluded from most discussions of realism. One argument against including poetry as a vital element in realism asserts that realism usually involves a type of content and an attitude toward that content, whereas poetry is preeminently a matter of form. “No other kind of writing holds its own words up to the light as poetry does,” states Jan Montefiore,¹ and it is that same linguistic self-consciousness that argues against poetry as a model of realism.

These days poetry has become, if anything, less concerned with what might be referred to in an old-fashioned way as verisimilitude and more concerned with language itself than ever before. (This is a generalization, of course, to which there are many exceptions.) If realism once assumed that language can convey some truth about “reality,” can produce verifiable meanings beyond intertextual play, it has also come to seem naive in an age of deconstruction; an age, indeed, in which poetry—and certain assumptions about poetry—now provide the model for all literature; to some, for all of life.

As an example, we might consider Margaret Homans' argument in Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980), a work deeply influenced by deconstructive post-structuralism. Homans says: “Literary experience is the poet's equivalent to the novelist's societal experience, in that it is the primary formative experience in the development of her identity as a poet.”² For Homans, “language's inherent fictiveness” means that the poet in particular (though her view of language also applies to prose) must pay primary attention to the nature and possibilities of her medium. Homans is doubtful that poetry can work to portray adequately the poet's (or anyone else's) experience of the world.

There is little distance between these assumptions about poetry and poets and the more far-reaching analyses of those like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida who have repeatedly come forward to assert that all we have (all so-called reality) is an endless chain of signifiers, interpretations more or less “literary,” in the sense that they are based upon nothing more solid than metaphor, itself always involved in a regression in the direction of other texts. These same assumptions make almost any discussion of literary realism seem quaint if not impossible.

Realism once claimed a closer tie to “the real” and, to many of its early practitioners, was a potent force in changing material conditions understood at that time to have a substantive density beyond interpretation. The widespread despair in many quarters of Western European and North American culture today that “poetry makes nothing happen” is an index of the fact that we no longer believe in the poet's primary agency. But beyond this, some of us have also come to believe that “poetry” is all there is. This represents a development beyond the modernist position ushered in by T. S. Eliot and others which in the 1940s began to put realism and poetry in very different critical camps.

Today, if realism means anything in particular, it is likely to be situated in a realm that does not include poetry. If poetry can be accommodated to realism, it is likely that the understanding of realism in play is more akin to Eric Sundquist's imaginative “country of the blue”³ than to the naturalist realism of the tough-minded writers of the 1890s, many of whom were nourished on careers in journalism.

Sundquist is surely right that an intelligent exploration of those texts generally associated most closely with realism reveals a bewildering range of attitudes, subjects, settings, and techniques that make difficult any comprehensive definition or any clear demarcation between realism and what is usually taken as its opposite, romanticism. “Which is to say again,” Sundquist insists, “that the life of American realism exists, perhaps, either everywhere or nowhere; like ‘the real’ itself, it resists containment, and for the very good reason that ‘the real’ in America, like the country itself, has always had a notoriously short life.”⁴

My interest in Sundquist's argument is in seeing it as part of our contemporary discourse in which the opposition between objective and subjective, if it hasn't collapsed entirely, is certainly less stringent than it once was. At such a juncture, it is easy enough for poetry to enter the realm of realism (indeed Sundquist includes the ecstatic realism of Whitman's poetry), but it does so at a cost. The political focus, that at one time, for Georg Lukács and others, was sharpened in the literature belonging-specifically to the capitalist era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has softened. Confronted by our own political helplessness, we are perhaps all too ready to see ourselves “waking in the blue.”

It is with some relief, therefore, that one turns back—perhaps anachronistically, certainly nostalgically—to a group of writers for whom poetry was still vital as a medium of political critique, who had no thought for the epistemological abyss, and who were passionately interested in having an effect on their world. I refer here to nineteenth-century women poets. With the exception of Emily Dickinson (a dubious candidate for a realist), these poets are virtually never mentioned in discussions of realism. Yet some of their works might profitably be studied as part of the reaction against the social and economic conditions of their time, conditions they saw as contributing to injustice, greed, political mismanagement, and cultural mystification.

If we understand realism in America as a movement whose first objective was to portray American life accurately and in detail, especially in its ordinary and local manifestations, then these women can certainly be classified as early realists whose work foreshadows the rise of local color writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. If, for the sake of argument, we use the definition of realism provided by the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,⁵ we can recognize in this poetry the three critical ingredients of poetic realism: descriptions of normal situations and average characters, often with an emphasis upon those in the lower strata of society; a preference for common language and homely images over high-flown rhetoric or esoteric literary allusions; and a tendency to try to approximate actual speech rhythms, even to reproduce dialogue as a basic ingredient of the poem.

Though no specific attitudes can necessarily be linked to realism broadly understood, I have further restricted my choice of precursors to those poems that include no overt moralizing. Though a moral (and political) perspective is certainly implied in many of these works, the ability to link them with later literary developments is strengthened, it seems to me, when one excludes poems that turn to the reader to spell out the moral point. It goes without saying that a “point of view” (or several) about what is being presented is an aspect of every literary text. Indeed, it has been suggested by Donald Pizer that American realism is especially “ethically idealistic,”⁶ although numerous contemporary interpreters of realism have shown that the ethics (or politics) of the text may differ from, even contradict, the conscious intentions of the writer.⁷ Nevertheless, if we wish to separate the examples of early realism provided by nineteenth-century women poets from typical American jeremiads, it seems well to concentrate on those poems that in some way violate our stereotypes of such women. The poems that follow, therefore, are not especially precious, pious, sentimental, or sweet. In fact, many of them are surprisingly chilling and tough-minded.

One might, for instance, look at three poets from the middle of the nineteenth century: Alice (1820-1871) and Phoebe (1824-1871) Cary and Maria White Lowell (1821-1853). All of them were politically engaged feminists and abolitionists. Lowell was a member of Margaret Fuller's circle; the Cary sisters worked for a time with Susan B. Anthony.

Maria Lowell's poem “The Slave-Mother”⁸ portrays the agony of a woman who knows that her daughter is destined for a life of shame and degradation. Lowell refuses the gambits of two conventions of nineteenth-century women's poetry: the poem about a child's death (usually consoling) and the poem that celebrates the mother-child relationship as nurturing. Rather, she (like Toni Morrison in Beloved) describes a woman whose most earnest prayer is that her child should die. Nowhere does the poem criticize this mother or suggest that some other position regarding her daughter's fate would have been preferable. Neither does the poem provide religious consolation. It simply ends:

She cannot bear to know her child must be as she hath been,
Yet she sees but one deliverance from infamy and sin,—
And so she cries at midnight, with exceeding bitter cry,
“God grant my little helpless one in helplessness may die!”

A number of women's poems from this period assume the persona of a simple character (often in a rural setting) whose concerns, like the slave mother's, represent a critique of the larger society. Alice Cary's “Growing Rich” is an example of an attack on industrial capitalism and the mercantile values it produced.

And why are you pale, my Nora?
          And why do you sigh and fret?
The black ewe had twin lambs to-day,
          And we shall be rich folk yet.
Do you mind the clover-ridge, Nora,
          That slopes to the crooked stream?
The brown cow pastured there this week,
          And her milk is sweet as cream.
The old grey mare that last year fell
          As thin as any ghost,
Is getting a new white coat, and looks
          As young as her colt, almost.
And if the corn-land should do well,
          And so, please God, it may,
I'll buy the white-faced bull a bell,
          To make the meadows gay.
I know we are growing rich, Johnny,
          And that is why I fret,
For my little brother Phil is down
          In the dismal coal-pit yet.
And when the sunshine sets in th' corn,
          The tassels green and gay,
It will not touch my father's eyes,
          That are going blind, they say.
But if I were not sad for him,
          Nor yet for little Phil,
Why, darling Molly's hand, last year,
          Was cut off in the mill.
And so, nor mare nor brown milch-cow,
          Nor lambs can joy impart,
For the blind old man and th' mill and mine
          Are all upon my heart.(9)

In addition to its unveiling of several social evils—child labor, the conditions in the mines, mill accidents—this poem introduces a form that reappears in many of these early realists' works: the dialogue between husband and wife. Neither Alice nor her sister Phoebe married. They maintained a very close relationship, sharing a house in New York they bought with the proceeds from their writings, until the deaths of both in the same year from tuberculosis. Apparently, Phoebe had a number of proposals of marriage which she rejected, preferring to preserve her freedom and remain with her sister. Though both sisters maintained a deep appreciation for marriage as an ideal, they were well aware that few real marriages even approximated that ideal. As feminists, they were particularly attuned to the way nineteenth-century marriages placed unequal burdens upon the woman. Of the two sisters, Phoebe was the one more given to satire in her presentation of marriage, as the following poem, “Dorothy's Dower,” illustrates.

PART I

          “My sweetest Dorothy,” said John,
          Of course before the wedding,
As metaphorically he stood,
          His gold upon her shedding,
          “Whatever thing you wish or want
          Shall be hereafter granted,
“For all my worldly goods are yours.”
          The fellow was enchanted!
          “About that little dower you have,
          You thought might yet come handy,
Throw it away, do what you please,
          Spend it on sugar-candy!
I like your sweet, dependent ways,
          I love you when you tease me;
The more you ask, the more you spend,
          The better you will please me.”

PART II

“Confound it, Dorothy!” said John,
          “I haven't got it by me.
You haven't, have you, spent that sum,
          The dower from Aunt Jemima?
No; well that's sensible for you;
          This fix is most unpleasant;
But money's tight, so just take yours
          And use it for the present.
Now I must go—to—meet a man!
          By George! I'll have to borrow!
Lend me a twenty—that's all right!
          I'll pay you back tomorrow.”

PART III

“Madam,” says John to Dorothy,
          And past her rudely pushes,
“You think a man is made of gold,
          And money grows on bushes!
Tom's shoes! your doctor! Can't you now
          Get up some new disaster?
You and your children are enough
          To break John Jacob Astor.
Where's what you had yourself when I
          Was fool enough to court you?
That little sum, till you got me,
          'T was what had to support you!”
“It's lent and gone, not very far;
          Pray don't be apprehensive.”
“Lent! I've had use enough for it:
          My family is expensive.
I didn't, as a woman would,
          Spend it on sugar-candy!”
“No, John, I think the most of it
          Went for cigars and brandy!”(10)

Of course, this poem is meant to be a humorous rather than serious polemic. Cary even gives the woman more power than was often possible in the real world where a man usually had full access to his wife's money after marriage and need not consult her about its use. Here Dorothy is able to protect a little of her dower, at least, and Cary gives her the last word. Her linguistic force is conveyed by the paucity of her words. Cary undoubtedly implies a link between language and money in Dorothy's ability to save her words and spend them only when necessary, a skill that emerges in high contrast to her husband's clear pattern of both linguistic and economic overspending.

Though this poem is meant to be light, the problem it unveils was one that several nineteenth-century women poets knew to their sorrow. Elizabeth Oakes-Smith and Celia Thaxter both found that their little personal incomes were recklessly spent by their husbands. Though Lucy Larcom (1824-1893) was another poet, like Cary, who preferred not to marry and rejected a suitor's proposal in order to protect her independence, she created a poem quite subtle and powerful in its way about a wife whose husband has married her for her money. This poem may be a precursor to Robinson's beautiful “Eros Turannos.” Larcom's homelier poem, “Getting Along,” begins:

We trudge on together, my good man and I,
Our steps growing slow as the years hasten by;
Our children are healthy, our neighbours are kind,
And with the world round us we've no fault to find.
'T is true that he sometimes will choose the worst way
For sore feet to walk in, a weary hot day;
But then my wise husband can scarcely go wrong,
And, somehow or other, we're getting along.

The success of these first two stanzas lies in the way the original picture of marital unity is modified, only to be reasserted once again. Going back to the initial two lines, however, one sees that the language used already contains a foreshadowing of darker things to come. The trudging and slowing that at first suggest a shared experience of aging (“getting along”) are also a description of the speaker's mental pattern as she doubles back on her own assertions of happiness, slowing down to reconsider.

Actual disharmony in the marriage comes through sharply in the fifth and sixth stanzas:

The blackbirds and thrushes come chattering near;
I love the thieves' music, but listen with fear:
He shoots the gay rogues I would pay for their song;—
We're different, sure; still, we're getting along.
He seems not to know what I eat, drink, or wear;
He's trim and he's hearty, so why should I care?
No harsh word from him my poor heart ever shocks:
I wouldn't mind scolding,—so seldom he talks.

Perhaps the poem would be more successful if it ended shortly after these reflections, leaving the wife uncertain about how to evaluate the differences that are becoming clearer to her in the very process of analyzing her marriage.

However, the last four stanzas introduce the issue of a financial motive.

It is true I was rich; I had treasures and land;
But all that he asked was my heart and my hand:
Though people do say it, 't is what they can't prove,—
“He married for money; she—poor thing! for love.”
My fortune is his, and he saves me its care;
To make his home cheerful's enough for my share.
He seems always happy our broad fields among;
And so I'm contented:—we're getting along.
With stocks to look after, investments to find,
It's not very strange that I'm seldom in mind:
He can't stop to see how my time's dragging on,—
And oh! would he miss me, if I should be gone?
Should he be called first, I must follow him fast,
For all that's worth living for then will be past.
But I'll not think of losing him: fretting is wrong,
While we are so pleasantly getting along.(11)

“Getting Along” is effective as an example of early realism not because it is about money, nor even because it exposes some truth about nineteenth-century marriage, but because it captures so well the kind of self-deception women who were economically and emotionally dependent upon their husbands must have engaged in. This self-deception, of course, is comprehensible in part because we know that the actualities of nineteenth-century life made submission in marriage necessary for most women. Even where the marriage was degrading, divorce remained generally “unthinkable.”

A number of women's poems detail—sometimes happily, sometimes irritably—the tasks a good housewife was called upon to perform. The black poet Mary E. Tucker (1838-?) composed a poem “Upon Receipt of a Pound of Coffee in 1863” that emerges as a delightful example of this genre. I will quote only the first three (of six) stanzas in order to demonstrate the lively specificity of some of these poems.

The sight of the coffee was good for sore eyes,
For I have not learned yet its worth to despise;
I welcomed each grain as I culled with care o'er,
And in fancy increased it to ten thousand more.
I put it on fire, and stirred round and round,
Then took it off gently when it was quite browned;
When cool I proceeded to fill up my mill,
And ground up a boiling with very good will.
I measured three spoons full, you see, for us three—
The old Lady Lane, my Grand-mother and me;
I added some water, then put it to boil,
And stood close by, watching, for fear it might spoil.(12)

Mary Weston Fordham's poem, “The Coming Woman,” may seem an odd candidate for entry under realism, for it is actually a futurist fantasy in which roles between husband and wife are reversed. However, in the process of detailing the activities that now the husband instead of the wife must perform, “The Coming Woman” gives us a picture of middle-class married life in the 1890s. Fordham, another black poet whose birth and death dates are unknown, published Magnolia Leaves in 1897, but she avoids using black dialect as some other poets of this period did, in imitation of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Just look, 'tis a quarter past six, love—
          And not even the fires are caught;
Well, you know I must be at the office—
          But, as usual, the breakfast'll be late.
Now hurry and wake up the children;
          And dress them as fast as you can;
“Poor dearies,” I know they'll be tardy,
          Dear me, “what a slow, poky man!”
Have the tenderloin broiled nice and juicy—
          Have the toast browned and buttered all right;
And be sure you settle the coffee:
          Be sure that the silver is bright.
When ready, just run up and call me—
          At eight, to the office I go,
Lest poverty, grim, should o'ertake us—
          “'Tis bread and butter,” you know.
The bottom from stocks may fall out,
          My bonds may get below par;
Then surely, I seldom could spare you
          A nickel, to buy a cigar.
All ready? Now, while I am eating,
          Just bring up my wheel to the door;
Then wash up the dishes; and, mind now,
          Have dinner promptly at four;
For tonight is our Woman's Convention,
          And I am to speak first, you know—
The men veto us in private,
          But in public they shout, “That's so.”
So “by-by”—In case of a rap, love,
          Before opening the door, you must look;
O! how could a civilized woman
          Exist, without a man cook.(13)

One might puzzle over the politics of both of these poems, of course. In the case of Tucker's coffee poem, there is no hint that this coffee may well have been imported from slave-driven coffee plantations in the Caribbean. We know very little about Mary Eliza Perine Tucker Lambert who published her Poems in 1867 under the name Mary E. Tucker except that she was black. Mary Weston Fordham remains equally mysterious. It is entirely due to the recent re-publication of black women by Oxford University Press that we have these poems at all.

In “The Coming Woman” it seems clear at the beginning that what is being satirized is the overbearing nineteenth-century autocrat of the breakfast table with his numerous demands, his superficial concern for the children, his patronizing praise, etc. However, the reference to the “Woman's Convention” in the penultimate stanza raises some questions. No inversion supplies a ready masculine target. Where Fordham says: “The men veto us in private, / But in public they shout, ‘That's so,’” she seems to wish to introduce an accurate picture of 1890s responses to the New Woman. Is it, then, the coming woman who is the target of this satire? Or, more accurately, is it the fearsome Titaness of 1890s reform movements, frequently held up to ridicule, whom Fordham wishes us to disdain? As a third possibility, is Fordham suggesting that the tyrannical behavior of certain husbands may indeed create this grotesque reversal? Her portrayal of duplicitous male response to early feminism is both shrewd politically and the one instance in which the speaker seems something other than a grotesque.

The fact that the politics of these poems is not always clear does not, of course, make them any less interesting as part of the school of realism. Most of the major male writers from Twain to Dos Passos have been queried and multiply interpreted in much the same way. Sundquist specifies the challenge of realism as the task of representing social injustice without recuperating its structural properties. Many of these women poets choose an empathetic identification with victims as a means of creating a political response, preferring an alliance with powerlessness to a contaminated assertion of power.

In “The Captive of the White City,” the western poet Ina Coolbirth (1841-1928) attacks the contradictions implicit in the vision of civilization purveyed at the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where Chief Rain-in-the-Face (supposedly General Custer's killer) was brought from Montana along with his teepee for purposes of display. Like a great many nineteenth-centry women poets, Coolbrith was sympathetic to the plight of the Indians. In her poems she insists:

From the wrongs of the White Man's rule
Blood only may wash the trace.
Alas, for the death-heaped plain!
Alas, for slayer and slain!
Alas for your blood-stained hands,
          O Rain-in-the-Face!

The poem ends with a powerful acknowledgment of the silence at the heart of Progressive America on the subject of the disenfranchised and murdered populations on which American cultural prosperity had been built. Though the marveling crowds wander up and down the streets of the White City,

                    there, in the wild, free breeze,
In the House of the Unhewn Trees,
          In the beautiful Midway Place,
                    The captive sits apart,
                    Silent, and makes no sign.
                    But what is the word in your heart,
O man of a dying race?
What tale on your lips for mine,
                    O Rain-in-the-Face?(14)

As is frequently the case in the poems I have culled out here as examples of nineteenth-century female realism, the poet leaves the question hanging, leaves the answer to be supplied by an engaged reader, whose energies ideally will be directed toward ameliorating the social evil described.

Julia Ward Howe's (1819-1910) fascinating poem “The Telegrams” is a series of vignettes strung together as though each were the substance of a telegram conveying vital information. All but the last stanza end with a question: what next? Many like this first one are darkly suggestive of a modern world gone awry and in need of a vision able to provide a more satisfactory direction for social progress.

Bring the hearse to the station,
          When one shall demand it, late;
For that dark consummation
          The traveler must not wait.
Men say not by what connivance
          He slid from his weight of woe,
Whether sickness or weak contrivance,
          But we know him glad to go.
                    On and on and ever on!
                              what next?

The fifth stanza gestures toward the economic woes connected to fluctuating economic cycles and the gold standard controversy.

Be rid of the notes they scattered;
          The great house is down at last;
The image of gold is shattered,
          And never can be recast.
The bankrupts show leaden features,
          And weary, distracted looks,
While harpy-eyed, wolf-souled creatures
          Pry through their dishonored books.
                    On and on and ever on!
                              What next?

Nevertheless, this poem is less political than philosophical in a broad sense, as it concludes:

Thus the living and dying daily
          Flash forward their wants and words,
While still on Thought's slender railway
          Sit scathless the little birds:
They heed not the sentence dire
          By magical hands exprest,
And only the sun's warm fire
          Stirs softly their happy breast.
                    On and on and ever on!
                              God next!(15)

Despite the attempt at a religious resolution, however, the soul of the poem remains its depiction of a highly mobile, urban society whose technology has not supplied it with any stable values. “The Telegrams” is a piece of social criticism very much in the spirit of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century realism. The fact that Howe seeks to capture in this poem a world riddled by social ills such as suicide, bankruptcy, murder, and syphilis, suggests that women were not always fastidious about the way they characterized this world any more than their male counterparts were.

One of the most tantalizing women poets of the nineteenth century is Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892), who is the only one of these women to make an appearance in the volume on American Realists and Naturalists in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.¹⁶ This volume, published in 1982, typically confines itself to prose writers, finding space for Cooke as an early realist in fiction, whose New England stories foreshadow those of Jewett and Freeman. What has been overlooked is that Cooke was also a fine, if uneven, poet, poetry being her preferred genre.

“In the Hammock” provides an illustration of what makes some of Cooke's poems so interesting. More of a romantic than a realist in most of her poems, she still deserves consideration here for her ability to provide a convincing portrait of a figure from the lower stratum of society, whose values are at odds with those of the Victorians yet inspire no critical commentary from Cooke. This poem shows the influence of Western literature, much of it in the realist mode, on writers born and bred in the East.

How the stars shine out at sea!
Swing me, Tita! Faster, girl!
I'm a hang-bird in her nest,
All with scarlet blossoms drest,
Swinging where the winds blow free.
Ah! how white the moonlight falls.
Catch my slipper! there it goes,
Where that single fire-fly shines,
Tangled in the heavy vines,
Creeping by the convent walls.
Ay de mi! to be a nun!
Juana takes the veil to-day,
She hears mass behind a grate,
While for me ten lovers wait
At the door till mass is done.
Swing me, Tita! Seven are tall,
Two are crooked, rich, and old,
But the other—he's too small;
Did you hear a pebble fall?
And his blue eyes are too cold.
If I were a little nun,
When I heard that voice below,
I should scale the convent wall;
I should follow at his call,
Shuddering through the dreadful snow.
Tita. Tita. hold me still!
Now the vesper bell is ringing,
Bring me quick my beads and veil.
Yes, I know my cheek is pale
And my eyes shine—I've been swinging.(17)

This poem is modern in two ways: it leaves a lot of gaps in the story and it suggests a very unconventional attitude toward female sexuality. The speaker's fantasy of following her small cold-eyed lover, “shuddering through the dreadful snow,” her delight in swinging and the physical exuberance it represents, are hardly consistent with nineteenth-century views of female passionlessness.¹⁸ Furthermore, the speaker is an attractive figure despite the fact that she tolerates lovers “crooked, rich and old.” She remains sympathetic, even more so than Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg, and she conveys more warmth than most of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio heroines.¹⁹ She's the product of a realist sensibility without the grimness of some realists.

Many products of American realism are informed by the insights of Marx, Darwin, and finally Freud. Cooke's poem predates Freud but foreshadows his suggestion that women have sexual desires as strong as men's. Sarah Helen Whitman's (1803-1878) late poem “Science” (1877) is an index of the impact of Darwinism on American culture, an impact usually traced first to the 1880s. Like the naturalist writers of a later era, Whitman creates a desolate picture of human life.

Earth's long, long dream of martyrdom and pain;
No God in heaven to rend the welded chain
Of endless evolution!

One expects from Whitman, who was a deeply spiritual woman, some rejoinder to this dismal perspective but it remains to be supplied by the reader. The poem simply ends:

                                                  Is this all?
And mole-eyed ‘Science,’ gloating over bones,
The skulls of monkeys and the Age of Stones,
Blinks at the golden lamps that light the hall
Of dusty death, and answers: “It is all.”(20)

Until recently it was assumed that women were silent until a much later period about matters such as sex and evolution. Poems like Whitman's help us to see that the forces of realism were beginning to have an impact in the third quarter of the century.

As historical scholarship reveals greater complexity in the worlds we have lost, it comes to seem more and more indefensible to exclude poetry from discussions of realism, especially since we must recognize that this exclusion is of comparatively recent origin. Indeed, as late as the 1930s critics were still considering poetry a part of realism. A 1932 work, American Literature and Culture by Grant C. Knight, devotes a whole section to “The Literature of Realism,” with subsections analyzing “Poetry” along with “The Novel” and “Drama.”²¹ For those who wrote of realism in the twenties and thirties, of course, realist poems were typically those of twentieth-century male writers—Edwin Markham's “The Man with the Hoe,” Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tilbury Town portraits, Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, Robert Frost's poems about New England, Carl Sandburg's and Vachel Lindsay's poems of the Midwest.

Without blurring the general outlines of realism entirely, it may be useful now to consider particular poems by nineteenth-century women poets as part of the early realist reaction to social, economic, intellectual and political changes. To do so helps revise the notion that nineteenth-century women poets were incapable of taking a hard look at social and psychological realities. Since most of these women also wrote more conventional verses, many of them pious and sentimental, the exposure of occasional realistic moments in their work also reveals that their role as “authors” was more complex than it has often been assumed to be.

From a post-structuralist perspective, we do not need to argue that the primary value of these examples of nineteenth-century realism lies in their historical accuracy. More useful to us is the perspective that poems like Lucy Larcom's “Getting Along,” Julia Ward Howe's “The Telegrams” and the works of the Cary sisters had strong representational value for their nineteenth-century readers who bought their books by the thousands. The politics of literary scholarship that once hid them from view may now serve to reveal that these nineteenth-century women poets were just as intensely involved in the process of America's self-representation as their better-remembered male counterparts. Their social commentary adds to our sense of what realism meant in the nineteenth century and what poetry may contribute to a gendered and historical understanding of the Real.

Notes

1. Feminism and Poetry (London: Pandora Press, 1987), p. 6.

2. Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), p. 8.

3. Eric Sundquist defines the “country of the blue” as the realm of imagination and art, immediately identifiable as the territory of American romance but, in Sundquist's hands, equally the territory of American realism. See “Introduction: The Country of the Blue” in American Realism: New Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982).

4. Ibid., pp. 6-7. For a helpful article on the distinction between realism and a concern for “the Real,” see also Tom Quirk, “Realism, the ‘Real,’ and the Poet of Reality: Some Reflections on American Realists and the Poetry of Wallace Stevens,” American Literary Realism 21:2 (Winter 1989), 34-53.

5. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, et al., rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984).

6. See Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, rev. ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984), p. 2.

7. See, for example, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), in which Walter Benn Michaels suggests that the works of both Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Theodore Dreiser end up fortifying precisely the positions both writers thought they were attacking.

8. We have no precise dating for most of these poems. Lowell's poetry was written in the late forties and early fifties, some of it published in journals and anthologies. Her husband, James Russell Lowell, published a private edition of her work in 1855 which he distributed to friends, but the first extended edition of her work did not appear until the twentieth century. See The Poems of Maria White Lowell, ed. Hope Jillson Vernon (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1936), pp. 54-55.

9. The Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary (Boston: Houghton Osgood, 1880), p. 98.

10. Ibid., p. 300.

11. The Poetical Works of Lucy Larcom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), pp. 25-26.

12. Poems (1867) rpt. in Collected Black Women's Poetry, vol. 1, ed. Joan R. Sherman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press—Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, 1988), pp. 105-06.

13. Sherman supplies the dates for Fordham's grandmother Mary Furman Weston Byrd (1792-1884) but there are no dates for Fordham herself. Magnolia Leaves (1897) rpt. in Collected Black Women's Poetry, vol. 2, pp. 74-75.

14. Songs from the Golden Gate (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), pp. 57-60.

15. From Sunset Ridge: Poems Old and New (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), pp. 22-24.

16. Perry D. Westbrook, “Rose Terry Cooke” in American Realists and Naturalists, ed. Donald Pizer and Earl N. Harbert, vol. 12 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1982), pp. 95-98.

17. Poems (New York: Gottsberger, 1888), pp. 296-97.

18. See Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology” in A Heritage of Her Own: Towards a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), pp. 162-81.

19. Undine Spragg appears in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913) rpt. (New York: Penguin-Signet, 1989). Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is sympathetic to the frustrations of its female characters but none of them seem comfortable with their own sexuality.

20. Poems (Boston: Houghton Osgood, 1879), pp. 190-91.

21. American Literature and Culture (New York: Ray Long and Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1932).